Hero-U - Kickstarter Update #20

November 17th, 2012, 03:43

They sure keep on trying, so here is update number 20 for Hero-U. It is about the Unity engine and programming, but also provides links to an interview and testimonials.Hero-U is currently 113K short of its goal with 4 more days to go.

For Hero-U we’re using Unity. Why is this good? Well, Unity is a professional grade engine that can make anything from a AAA blockbuster to the smallest indie project. What this means is we have a powerful and professional game engine that can do just about anything a modern game can do, for a reasonably low price. In addition, it supports many of the top platforms, including PC, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux, though that’s not to say it’s just a matter of pushing “build” to target these platforms, but that’s another story entirely.
Because Unity is so flexible, powerful and cheap, it’s being used in a lot of projects, so has a large and active community, which means if you’re trying to do something, chances are someone has already done it.Moving Spritely

One of the downsides of Unity though is it’s never been that strong on the 2D capability, because of this Brawsome uses 3rd a few party libraries to bridge this gap, these include Sprite Manager 2 and EZ GUI from Above and Beyond Software. It’s not that I *couldn’t* write this software myself, but writing the software is the easy part, the countless hours of robust testing across a number of platforms and game types, and performance optimization and bug fixing is where the real value lies.
This is another reason Unity is great - Because of the volume of people using it, there are many great 3rd party plugins and add-ons at a reasonable price to plug any gaps in the engine, such as supporting iOS Cloud, or Steam integration. And now with Linux support being added, I’m certain we will start seeing Linux-related plugins popping up as well, mostly like from the Linux enthusiast community.
One of the reasons I haven't yet ported Jolly Rover to iPad, where it would fit perfectly, is because it was created in an engine that only supported PC and Mac, and because the engine was a closed system, porting it would essentially require writing a new engine. When making MacGuffin’s Curse the first thing I did was look at the available engines and determine which supported the most platforms, had the best features, support and community. Unity ticked all these boxes.
If I had made Jolly Rover in Unity, it would be on a number of platforms today instead of just PC and Mac – in fact, work has already started on a full engine port of Jolly Rover to Unity, but the golden quantity of time has been one that has been hard for me to come by. It’s actually just about there, but work and family life has left scant hours to dedicate to this fully.

Interesting to see so many games using Unity. I think i really need to spend some time learning this framework.

Sad thing is I don't think Hero-U is going to make it. I'll assume that they will pitch the project again at a lower goal with some features removed. I'm not really interested in the project naturally but with all of the high quality updates I've seen I had to support them just to see what gets made. I wish them well and hope that it makes this round or the next if not.

Well, donations have really picked up in the past few days, so its still quite possible…. 301.5k out of 400k..Only a little over 3 days to go, but they received more or less 15k per day for the past few days now. That still wouldn't cut it, but if you consider that most projects have a pretty big last day, then it isn't impossible.

Though its gonna be hard since it seems that a big part of the new money comes from existing backers that have raised their pledge rather than new backers…